Season 5 Episode 17: Oldies But Young ‘Uns

Every so often Married with Children built an episode around something small and universal, and “Oldies But Young ‘Uns” is the best example of it. Al hears a song on the radio. He knows it. He can hum it. He cannot name it, cannot name the artist, and cannot get anyone in his life to help him, and it slowly consumes him. Peg is no use, the Darcys are no use, and a trip to a record store called Final Vinyl produces a clerk who can identify every other customer’s half-remembered humming on the first try and then draws a complete blank on Al’s. By the second act Al is on his knees in a record shop bargaining with the ceiling over a forty-five. Running alongside it is the more consequential half of the episode. Kelly has a new boyfriend, Vinnie Verducci, the son of Al’s equally disreputable friend Charlie Verducci, and the Verduccis come over to the house. Al’s position on the matter is that Vinnie may look but absolutely may not touch, a rule Vinnie finds difficult to live by with Kelly in the room. Charlie, meanwhile, spends the visit casing the place. This is the episode that introduced the Verduccis to the series, and the pairing of Joseph Bologna and a very young Matt LeBlanc went over well enough that the characters came back three more times across seasons 5 and 6 and then got a show of their own. The series creators, Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye, wrote this one themselves.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: March 17, 1991
• Season and episode: Season 5, Episode 17
• Overall episode number: 97
• Written by: Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Production note: Produced eighteenth in the season but aired seventeenth. From this episode onward, season 5 stopped airing in production order.
• Production note: This episode set up the backdoor pilot “Top of the Heap,” which became the hundredth episode of the series and spun the Verduccis off into their own show.
• Title note: A play on “oldies but goodies” crossed with the regional slang “young ‘uns.”

Guest Cast

• Joseph Bologna as Charlie Verducci
• Matt LeBlanc as Vinnie Verducci
• Suli McCullough as Dave, the record store clerk
• Gene “Bean” Baxter as DJ Rick Cool (credited as Bean Baxter)
• Michael Stanton as Customer #1
• Ron Litman as Customer #2

The Song, the Store, and the Verduccis

The song Al spends the episode chasing is “Anna (Go to Him)” by Arthur Alexander, which is why the only lyric he can produce is the phrase “go with him.” On the original broadcast the record plays over the end credits. On the season 3 and later DVD releases, where the licensed music was swapped out, it is replaced by the same instrumental substitute used in place of “Love and Marriage,” which takes a good deal of the air out of the ending.

Final Vinyl, the record store Al visits, turns up again in season 7’s “The Chicago Wine Party.” Dave the clerk is played by Suli McCullough, who would later be familiar as Crazy Legs in Don’t Be a Menace and as Mouse on The Jamie Foxx Show. The DJ, Rick Cool, is played by Gene “Bean” Baxter, at the time half of the Kevin and Bean morning show on KROQ in Los Angeles. His on-air partner Kevin Ryder also appeared on the series, playing the DJ in “You Better Shop Around.”

The Verducci half of the episode is the one that mattered to the show’s future. Matt LeBlanc was three years away from Friends when he turned up here as Kelly’s boyfriend, and Joseph Bologna’s Charlie is pitched perfectly as the kind of man who shakes your hand and leaves with your watch. The characters worked well enough that the production built “Top of the Heap” around them, aired it as the hundredth episode, and sent them off to a short-lived series of their own.

Vinnie’s attempts to impress the family produce some of the episode’s stranger lines, including a mangled Franklin Roosevelt quotation that he attributes to Winston Churchill and a detour into the life of a former Major League ballplayer. He also brings Kelly a Garfield book, which may be the single most Vinnie Verducci gesture in the episode.

Famous Quotes

• Peg, trying to redirect Al’s attention after the kids clear out: “I know what will take your mind off that record for a minute. You could make love to me 4 times!” Al: “Peg, when I said I was after an oldie, I meant but a goodie.”
• Al, summarizing his condition: “I hate my life. Can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t bury the wife in the backyard. I’m beside myself with depression.”
• Al, on his knees in the record store after the clerk fails him: “All I wanted was a forty-five! A stinking forty-five! The record or the gun… I’ll even settle for the damned malt liquor! Just this once, can you show that you can love even Al Bundy?!”

Notes

• Al reaffirms his hatred of Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey,” which Peg had previously used to torture him back in season 1’s “Thinnergy.”
• Al refuses to have his obsession trivialized by a woman who finds the NBC series Hunter engrossing. Ed O’Neill had himself guest starred on Hunter in 1985, playing a crooked parole officer.
• Rick Cool’s “the colors, the colors” line came back later in the series, used by Bud in “Married… with Queen” and again in “My Dinner with Anthrax.”
• Charlie Verducci sings the theme from The Patty Duke Show.
• Christina Applegate and Matt LeBlanc would cross paths again years later when she appeared on Friends as Rachel’s sister Amy.
• A watch-related goof runs through the Verducci visit: Peg accuses Charlie of stealing her watch, but she is not wearing one in the scene, and Charlie’s cigar switches hands between cuts.